Misc. brain dumps
Jul. 20th, 2006 05:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mirrorshardIt's been awhile since I posted, so this may skip around a bit as I do a series of brain dumps.
Getting a 12" desk fan helped a lot, but it got exponentially better when I put a large bowl of cold water in front of it. What I'd wanted to do was to make a tabletop fountain, but I couldn't find anywhere to get a suitable pump.
I see two contrasting responses to images of Israeli children writing on missiles destined for Lebanon, at boing boing, where it's spawned a comment thread about just what those metal weapon things in the picture are, and The Guardian, where it's spawned a comment thread about which side is in the right (or from more moderate commenters, which side is less wrong) and how similar things happen elsewhere. I think the first one takes the prize when it comes to repulsiveness, but not by that large a margin.
From the Guardian again, an article and comment piece on the Tory party's new thoughts on the state of the railways and the farcical privatization in the 1990s. There are several reasons I've never considered voting for a Tory candidate, not least of which is the repellent Our Sort of People attitude I've always sensed from their election literature (and certainly not least of which is because nobody else in my family did), but one of the strongest ones is what they did to the railways.
My family never owned a car of our own; we took buses or walked, and for long journeys took the train. I've always approved of public transport, in principle and for convenience, even though it's often been very much lacking in the latter, first when I was living in North Wales and bus routes ran twice a day, and then with the falling reliability and increasing complexity in recent years. The principle comes in two parts - one is the more usual set of environmental principles of mile sharing, fuel saving, and access for the poor, and the other is what I can only describe as ideological.
Order is good, and by order I mean the opposite of entropy. Large projects (what we used to refer to as 'public works') that facilitate everyday life, make things easier by their existence - the flywheel effect. They require capital investment and maintenance, which is to say that they require someone to own and look after them. The classic example I like to use for this is the London Underground, and I shall crave your indulgence to summon the shade of GK Chesterton to illustrate this.
“The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.
“Nonsense! ” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. “Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!”
“It is you who are unpoetical,” replied the poet Syme. “If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”
I suppose if I were going weak at the knees championing private enterprise for this, it might invoke visions of Ayn Rand; but the logic of the position, as I understand it, requires it to exist for existence's sake, or at least to maximise external benefits rather than maximising its own profits from what it does. (There's also an emotional desire to own a piece of that, to be part of the reason for it and to share in it, rather than to be a paying customer.)
The economic problem with that is that those external benefits are often either difficult to track, or entirely non-monetary. It's easy to feel good about that capital investment and subsidy cost if you can point to money saved on rail tickets vs petrol, or a businessman's productive time vs time spent staring at a pair of tail-lights, but being able to put two early teenage children on the train, wave goodbye, and get the other parent to pick them up on the other side of the country (which happened to me something like a dozen times a year for seven years - neither parent drove, and my sister and I spent the holidays with our father) is priceless in several senses.
The amount of capital invested, though, can be extremely tempting, once you start thinking of it as money instead of functionality, and that's half of what led the then Tory government on their privatization spree. (I'm not going to address other privatizations, but similar arguments apply to some degree to most of them.) It's as though, noticing that you'd been spending rather a lot on central heating this winter, you decided that the rational thing to do would be to turn the kitchen table into firewood instead.
Another motivation cited at the time was to introduce competition and efficiency into the rail service. I've never understood the competition argument; no matter how fast and efficient the Charteuse train from King's Cross to York is, it's not going to have any effect at all on my decision whether or not to take the Cerise train from Euston to Holyhead. If anyone can explain it to me, please do.
Efficiency, of course, is another good thing, but it also requires understanding what you're trying to optimize first. The pre-privatization rail system had quite a lot of slack and apparent inefficiency (and undoubtedly some real inefficiency - Im not qualified to say how much of either was involved) but one of the first things the newly formed train operators did was to impose stricter targets on their staff, while at the same time making a number of the staff they'd inherited redundant. (Virgin Trains, for instance, made a large proportion of their drivers redundant and then, finding out they didn't have enough left to run their services, were forced to hire them back at a rather higher rate.)
At the same time, they were hideously embarrassed by the terrible stigma of actually owning Stuff and employing Staff in this bright new weightless world of flexible, fast-responding businesses focusing on core business activities, and proceeded to outsource as many functions (like cleaning and track inspection) as possible. Which is only fair, I suppose, they'd been outsourced themselves. I do find the principle of increasing efficiency (n., a management metric superficially related to, but in fact entirely distinct from, effectiveness) by introducing new layers of management and insulation rather counterintuitive. (Here we divert for a moment to consider the fundamental fallacy of trickle-down economics, which is that a) nobody wants wealth to trickle down past them, and b) the higher you are in the pyramid the more ability you have to stop it doing so.)
So, to return to the article which sparked this off originally, the Tories have now realized what a mess they made with their asset-stripping and promised not to do it again. We have to have a certain amount of scepticism about this sort of promise, but this is the one thing which I'd always said would make me reconsider my opinions of them.
I'm not planning on a Damascene conversion, but having had more exposure to the Liberal Democrats since the last election (specifically, the thinking and ideology behind their policy proposals) they scare me more than either Labour or the Tories do. I have the relatively good fortune never to have lived in a marginal constituency, though.
Hm, I'm sure there was something else I wanted to write about. Several things, in fact (and I haven't forgotten about history-of-science rambling, which will certainly turn up soonish). But they escape my mind, and this post was quite long enough already.
Getting a 12" desk fan helped a lot, but it got exponentially better when I put a large bowl of cold water in front of it. What I'd wanted to do was to make a tabletop fountain, but I couldn't find anywhere to get a suitable pump.
I see two contrasting responses to images of Israeli children writing on missiles destined for Lebanon, at boing boing, where it's spawned a comment thread about just what those metal weapon things in the picture are, and The Guardian, where it's spawned a comment thread about which side is in the right (or from more moderate commenters, which side is less wrong) and how similar things happen elsewhere. I think the first one takes the prize when it comes to repulsiveness, but not by that large a margin.
From the Guardian again, an article and comment piece on the Tory party's new thoughts on the state of the railways and the farcical privatization in the 1990s. There are several reasons I've never considered voting for a Tory candidate, not least of which is the repellent Our Sort of People attitude I've always sensed from their election literature (and certainly not least of which is because nobody else in my family did), but one of the strongest ones is what they did to the railways.
My family never owned a car of our own; we took buses or walked, and for long journeys took the train. I've always approved of public transport, in principle and for convenience, even though it's often been very much lacking in the latter, first when I was living in North Wales and bus routes ran twice a day, and then with the falling reliability and increasing complexity in recent years. The principle comes in two parts - one is the more usual set of environmental principles of mile sharing, fuel saving, and access for the poor, and the other is what I can only describe as ideological.
Order is good, and by order I mean the opposite of entropy. Large projects (what we used to refer to as 'public works') that facilitate everyday life, make things easier by their existence - the flywheel effect. They require capital investment and maintenance, which is to say that they require someone to own and look after them. The classic example I like to use for this is the London Underground, and I shall crave your indulgence to summon the shade of GK Chesterton to illustrate this.
“The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.
“Nonsense! ” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. “Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!”
“It is you who are unpoetical,” replied the poet Syme. “If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”
I suppose if I were going weak at the knees championing private enterprise for this, it might invoke visions of Ayn Rand; but the logic of the position, as I understand it, requires it to exist for existence's sake, or at least to maximise external benefits rather than maximising its own profits from what it does. (There's also an emotional desire to own a piece of that, to be part of the reason for it and to share in it, rather than to be a paying customer.)
The economic problem with that is that those external benefits are often either difficult to track, or entirely non-monetary. It's easy to feel good about that capital investment and subsidy cost if you can point to money saved on rail tickets vs petrol, or a businessman's productive time vs time spent staring at a pair of tail-lights, but being able to put two early teenage children on the train, wave goodbye, and get the other parent to pick them up on the other side of the country (which happened to me something like a dozen times a year for seven years - neither parent drove, and my sister and I spent the holidays with our father) is priceless in several senses.
The amount of capital invested, though, can be extremely tempting, once you start thinking of it as money instead of functionality, and that's half of what led the then Tory government on their privatization spree. (I'm not going to address other privatizations, but similar arguments apply to some degree to most of them.) It's as though, noticing that you'd been spending rather a lot on central heating this winter, you decided that the rational thing to do would be to turn the kitchen table into firewood instead.
Another motivation cited at the time was to introduce competition and efficiency into the rail service. I've never understood the competition argument; no matter how fast and efficient the Charteuse train from King's Cross to York is, it's not going to have any effect at all on my decision whether or not to take the Cerise train from Euston to Holyhead. If anyone can explain it to me, please do.
Efficiency, of course, is another good thing, but it also requires understanding what you're trying to optimize first. The pre-privatization rail system had quite a lot of slack and apparent inefficiency (and undoubtedly some real inefficiency - Im not qualified to say how much of either was involved) but one of the first things the newly formed train operators did was to impose stricter targets on their staff, while at the same time making a number of the staff they'd inherited redundant. (Virgin Trains, for instance, made a large proportion of their drivers redundant and then, finding out they didn't have enough left to run their services, were forced to hire them back at a rather higher rate.)
At the same time, they were hideously embarrassed by the terrible stigma of actually owning Stuff and employing Staff in this bright new weightless world of flexible, fast-responding businesses focusing on core business activities, and proceeded to outsource as many functions (like cleaning and track inspection) as possible. Which is only fair, I suppose, they'd been outsourced themselves. I do find the principle of increasing efficiency (n., a management metric superficially related to, but in fact entirely distinct from, effectiveness) by introducing new layers of management and insulation rather counterintuitive. (Here we divert for a moment to consider the fundamental fallacy of trickle-down economics, which is that a) nobody wants wealth to trickle down past them, and b) the higher you are in the pyramid the more ability you have to stop it doing so.)
So, to return to the article which sparked this off originally, the Tories have now realized what a mess they made with their asset-stripping and promised not to do it again. We have to have a certain amount of scepticism about this sort of promise, but this is the one thing which I'd always said would make me reconsider my opinions of them.
I'm not planning on a Damascene conversion, but having had more exposure to the Liberal Democrats since the last election (specifically, the thinking and ideology behind their policy proposals) they scare me more than either Labour or the Tories do. I have the relatively good fortune never to have lived in a marginal constituency, though.
Hm, I'm sure there was something else I wanted to write about. Several things, in fact (and I haven't forgotten about history-of-science rambling, which will certainly turn up soonish). But they escape my mind, and this post was quite long enough already.
